


Adrenal Fatigue

by distractionpie



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Comfort, Cuddling, Gen, Hospitals, What was that green stuff anyway?, post 3x08
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-15
Updated: 2019-07-15
Packaged: 2020-06-29 04:17:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19822369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/distractionpie/pseuds/distractionpie
Summary: In the midst of the discoveries and fighting Robin hardly had time to notice her fear. Afterwards, she's left alone with her questions and concerns.





	Adrenal Fatigue

After is a new sort of bad to anything Robin has ever experienced before.

Russian spies and monsters were terrifying, pee your pants a little terrifying, but the thrill, the adventure of it all had kept Robin going, riding high on a potent cocktail of adrenaline and mystery drugs.

But the monster was killed and the army, the American army, flew in to mop up the mess and that was great, they won, and everything is going to be okay again now.

That was when Robin's hands started to shake.

Paramedics take her to the ER. She'd complain about the potential bills that she didn't need because she felt fine, but they kept talking about unknown side effects of whatever she'd been dosed with, about it being the poison she'd first feared it to be, and about complex injuries, internal bleeding and brain haemorrhages and infections and suddenly Robin's hands are shaking even more and that could be a symptom of all sorts of things.

They try to call her parents from the hospital, but she's not surprised when it does no good. Her dad's a trucker, out of town far more often than he's ever been involved in Robin's life, and her mom is on a night shift at the cannery on the outskirts of town and if she weren't at work she'd be deep asleep and still no help to Robin.

They can't get hold of Steve's parents either, she hears two of the nurses complaining about that from where they're standing just outside her door, apparently from the same 'if you can't see them then they can't hear you' school of thought as Steve and Dustin.

Robin doesn’t hate hospitals; she doesn’t think anybody feels fondly about them, but they’ve never really bothered her except in the same way that she’s bothered by traffic or bad weather or any of a hundred other unpleasant things that are nevertheless part of normal life. But right now she feels uneasy. Too much has happened for her to be sitting in bed alone with her thoughts and confusion and fear. Especially not in a hospital bed when at some point in the chaos of the night she’s sure she remembers Jonathan and Nancy talking about the monster having been here not so long ago.

The doctor who checked her over said she was being kept in for observation but apparently they aren't watching her closely because nobody stops her from climbing out of bed and pulling her uniform shorts back on under the uncomfortably open-backed hospital gown and making her way down the corridor looking through doors until she finds Steve.

He’s been given a single room too and is also unsupervised, though unlike her he’s been clipped to a monitor and there’s an IV drip leading under his blanket. She’d known Steve had been beaten worse than her; but under the pallid glow of the hospital lights he looks awful, ashen skin mottled with sickly green bruises and the size of his cuts all the more disturbing now that the blood has been cleaned from around them and she can’t tell herself that the mess is making the wounds look worse than they are.

She’s seen worse tonight, but that’s a cold comfort.

His eyes are shut and Robin wonders if he might be sleeping, is reluctantly impressed because she’s not sure she’s ever going to be able to sleep again after what has happened tonight.

But when she whispers his name, quietly checking her suspicions, his eyes snap open in a way that has her revising her judgment and concluding that Steve is as tense and restless as she is.

There’s a plastic chair by his bed, clearly dragged out of its normal position and she wonders who placed it there. She hasn’t had any visitors, but then, why would she? The only friend she had who knew about her adventure turned nightmare was Steve and he was clearly stuck in this bed, although apparently he’d been entertaining company while she’d been alone with her fears and shock.

Well, he has no company now and Robin decides that’s as good as an invitation, sitting down and then dragging herself and the chair closer still to the bed.

“They’re not letting you go home either then,” she observes. She’d normally consider stating the obvious beneath her, but right now it’s easier to cling to what little makes sense, even if all she has in that department is that it isn’t at all surprising they’ve kept Steve in, given how cautious they were acting towards her and the fact Steve had managed to take rather more messy blows to the face.

But Steve’s mouth quirks up into a wry smile at her bland remark, a look more optimistic than she could manage right now, as he says, “Talk about overkill, right? Nobody made this much of a fuss last year when I fought Billy..." he hesitates for a moment, smile falling away as abruptly as it had come, and Robin finds herself suddenly staring intently at Steve's charts because she never had anything to do with Billy beyond seeing him around, but the redheaded girl from the group of kids that always hung around Steve was Billy's sister and there seemed like there was a lot of history between them all, but now he's dead and Robin never knew him let alone what she ought to say about him now. But then Steve is shaking his head and saying, "But I guess last time didn't involve anything as scandalous as drugs," his tone making it clear he's trying to forcibly hold on to his levity.

It falls flat.

The high wasn't bad when it was happening but now Robin can think clearly again she remembers the terror of seeing the needle, the sharp pain of the injection, the bile that had risen in her throat when she'd first felt the strange tingling in her limbs and how frightened she'd been of a drawn-out painful death at the hands of poison. 

And the passing thought of poison sends her mind stumbling over something else.

"Hey Steve, did you ever tell anyone about that green stuff?" She supposes she could have said something too, but she'd been rather caught up in the fact that everyone else apparently already knew about the monsters from past run-ins and Robin had been having a hard time just following the familiar ways they talked about the whole situation and trying to work out if what was happening to her was real or if she'd just hit a new stage of her high. It hadn’t even occurred to her to interject with more detail on what she’d seen when Dustin and Erica and Steve were all talking loudly about it at the same time that Nancy Wheeler and Jonathan Byers were telling their own story about giant killer rats and the kids who always got Steve to sneak them though the back way into the movie theater rounded off the cacophony with some sort of mad libs game about monsters that had quickly turned out to be not a game after all.

But this had all begun because they’d been investigating Russian smuggling of mysterious packages that had turned out to be green and corrosive.

Steve blinks at her. “Uh... I mean, there was the Russians trying to open the gate and then all that stuff with the mind flayer, so I guess I just... forgot? Do you think it was important?"

A few hours ago, Robin would have agreed without hesitation. Now her whole world is in disarray and it's hard to put everything that’s happened in any sort of perspective.

"I mean, they sure seemed to be smuggling a lot of it into Hawkins,” she says. “And if what it did to the floor is anything to go by, it's dangerous stuff." But on the plus side, it hadn’t tried to eat them.

Steve shrugs. There’s something a little glazed around his eyes that has Robin wondering if the doctors gave him better painkillers than they did her (they’d been worried that anything they gave her might interact with the drugs she’d already been given by the Russians, and they’d said her injuries weren’t that bad, which was true relative to Steve but his being in more pain didn’t really alleviate her discomfort) or if it was just from Steve being hit in the head too many times in one night. But he sounds confident when he says, “I mean, it’s green goo. How dangerous can it actually be? Sure, it dissolved some stuff, but there was stuff in the chem lab at school that could do that.”

That’s not a bad argument. It’s not a great one, Robin paid enough attention in science and history in school to know that chemical weapons were a thing and were bad, but she hardly has the expertise to provide a compelling refutation and anyway, “The army has taken over the place now, they'll know what to do about it."

“I guess,” Steve says. He sounds far less convinced by that than he did of his own reasoning that whatever the Russian’s were smuggling couldn’t be as bad as they’d initially thought. And he might have a point, Robin supposes, since the Russians had been able to set up that enormous underground base with all that personnel without anybody noticing. Meanwhile the army hadn’t even turned up until after they’d taken the monster out themselves.

But Robin is exhausted and right now she could use an easy answer. “You’re probably right,” she decides, and six months ago she could never have imagined saying those words to Steve Harrington but right now she needs something solid to believe in and his conviction on this will do. "It's not like the Russians could have taken it all with them, not when they cleared out of there in such a hurry."

“Yeah,” Steve says, then yawns enormously. “Fuck. I feel like I haven’t rested in a week. At least last time I got dragged into monster shit it was all over in one night.”

Robin decides not to remind him that he’d gone looking for the Russian codes with Dustin Henderson, not been dragged. She’s got to know enough about that kid over the past few days to be sure he’d have gone it alone if Steve hadn’t been interested, and also that Steve was far too dedicated to looking out for the kid to ever let that happen.

“I didn’t mean to disturb you, coming in here,” she says, though the speed at which he’d opened his eyes to her had suggested that the sleep deprivation hadn’t won over his vigilance then.

“You’re not keeping me up. I just don’t think I could stop myself passing out even if I tried,” Steve admits. “I’m gonna be out in five minutes flat. You don’t have to keep me company.” As if she’d come here with thoughts of her reassuring him.

She curls her legs under her and can feel the movement pulling at the ties of her gown and the plastic sticking to her bare skin. It’s hardly comfortable but she’d been so alone and afraid in her room, just like she’d been in that Russian cell before they’d dragged Steve in, battered and half hysterical, but ready to lend her the strength she’d needed to turn panicked thoughts of an escape attempt into action.

“Of course I don’t, dingus,” she says. But she doesn’t leave.

After a moment, Steve shakes his head, then awkwardly attempts a half roll half shuffle movement that shifts him to the far edge of the bed. For a moment Robin thinks that he’s just getting comfortable himself, albeit in a rather odd way, but then he raises his left arm with a slight grimace and says, “Well, c’mon if you’re staying,” and she realises his intent with a jolt.

He’s looking at her like it’s the most obvious thing in the world for her to climb in with him and, after the madness of the last forty-eight hours, Robin can’t think of any good reason not to.

Though the moment after she lays down beside him, she realises one. The hospital beds aren’t exactly generously sized and neither she nor Steve is especially small.

There’s some kicking as they jostle around each other, awkward and uncomfortable but in none of the ways that Robin had feared when she’d considered the prospect that she might one day find herself in bed with a guy. And when Steve’s arm settles around her shoulders, finally finding a position where they can both fit without her getting tangled in his IV or either of them falling out of the bed, she feels safer than she has in days.

They’re both asleep within moments.

**Author's Note:**

> More Robin PoV. This time I actually proofed it too so there should be like 50% less typos. This started out very much being about the fact the green stuff plot thread kind of got dropped, but mostly turned into friendship and feelings because I know what my real priorities are.


End file.
